Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/186

176 second part of King Henry VI., where his first affirmation of his desperate soul is evoked by the news of his father's death, to be avenged on the house of Clifford.

In these echoes of the chroniclers, or of other plays, we have the very report of the "ill-shaped, crooked-backed, lame-armed, tyrannous" Richard of the legend and the tragedy which Shakespeare seized upon. But the character, the soul within the body, the individual within the type, the precise cold, fierce temperament behind the ambition, remained to be created.

To show the true mastery of his creature, Shakespeare, very early in the play, broke with his predecessors and invented a new test most unmistakably to determine it. After the opening in which Gloster declares his want of looks and love's aptitude and majesty, and his morbid, self-aggravated sense of his own deformity, we are brought almost at once to the amazing love-making across the coffin of Henry VI.: a capital instance of Shakespeare's dilation of the pages of history or the old play-books. It is on of the most cynical things in all the rack of love's satires fitted to the stage,—this moral divestiture and sudden capture of the Lady Anne: Anne, Warwick the King-maker's daughter, who had been betrothed to Prince Edward. And Edward, as we are bid remember, was the murdered Henry's son, and himself one of the long train of princely interveners thrust into limbo to make space for Gloster's installation. For, Hamlet's opposite, "true scion of Atreus' line," Richard hurried everything impetuously to its conclusion. This is why he succeeded with the Lady Annes and the Queen Elizabeths of his experience,—types of that feminine order which likes a man to know his own mind, and presume on his masculine initiative and his strong hand and his hold on the reins—up to the brink of insolence.

But the queen and the woman who, this sardonic love-making apart, must have made many a young reader of old plays turn eagerly to the pages of Richard III., wondering what kind of touchstone she should prove, in her high spirit, to his steely temper, is Margaret of Anjou, who,—

Queen Margaret in the play, however, is Margaret grown old. To her falls the lot of the dark sibyl and the scolding old woman, whose wrinkles almost match Gloster's elf-marks and crookback. It is hard to believe that Shakespeare is the original author of every curse in the budget of maledictions which she unloads in her great scene in the second act; for there are lines in it, terrible or beautiful, which set a standard by which their cruder neighbors seem crude indeed. Two of the finest ever put into the mouth of a queen, old or young, are hers. It is where she says to Buckingham, when he has urged her to be silent, and declared that curses do not really carry past the lips of those that utter them,—

A few lines more, and we come to the refrain of Margaret the prophetess, which we hear sounding on to the edge of the last catastrophe and to the fifth act, where it is once more echoed by Buckingham, who remembers at Salisbury what she had foretold in London.

As we follow the black shadow of Queen Margaret, we are made aware more than once of the apparent traces of that lost play of Richard III., upon which, we are led to suppose, Shakespeare worked. If there was no such play, it is hard to account for the sheer commonplace which appears in some scenes, and which has very much the effect of the obvious gag suggested by a stage-manager who felt that an audience must be humored, or that actors must have their fair allowance of "fat" lines. The only other way out of the difficulty lies through a wilderness of conjecture about Shakespeare's earliest experiments, and his revision for hasty performance of rude-scrawled drafts of plays, passed from hand to hand, many of which were destined never to be converted from dirty, thumbed, and tattered player's copies into decent quartos.

The battle of the quartos and folios has raged round the head of King Rich-